The Media Come out of Denial

No question about it, the Monica Lewinsky story has
dominated the media like few others in history. But of all the pronouncements
coming from the seemingly inexhaustible sully of commentators out there, one
statement was the most salient. I was struck by Bill Safire's read on
"Meet the Press": "I may be the last person in America who
still thinks that the financial relationship that Bill Clinton has with the
Riady family in Indonesia than any possible sexual relationship he had with a
White House aide."

No matter what Monica Lewinsky ultimately has to say, Safire
is right. But he's whispering into a tornado. The Monica story, with its fury
drawing from six years of unresolved Clinton scandals, is a potent cocktail of
jailbait sexual allegations and perjury charges that have already captured the
usually apolitical public that feeds on the table scraps of O.J. and JonBenet
updates. It's water cooler dynamite. We can mourn the lack of attention to the
Asiagate swamp or Dan Burton's House hearings on political manipulation of the
Interior Department's Indian casino decisions, but this is one story the media
actually may be determined to take to the finish line. I hedge on that a bit
simply because the media have never taken a Clinton scandal to
resolution.

In theory , there are three journalistic stages to scandal
stories: allegation, investigation, and resolution. The media's record
covering this administration is sorry. Many times they won't even touch the
allegation, even after some legal body has resolved the story for them. Take
Judge Royce Lamberth's decision to fine the White House $285,000 for
bald-facedly lying about the composition of the Clinton health care task
force. Lamberth declared "It is clear that the decisions here were made
at the highest levels of government. " From start to finish, the media
have virtually ignored it.

On other occasions, a scandal would start with a small
burst, then peter out as the White House pounded their liberal friends into
submission by suggesting they didn't want to be tools of a right-wing
conspiracy. Take Hillary's $100,000 commodities bonanza. The allegations led
to the famous Pink Lady press conference, with everyone cooing about the First
Lady's "performance," all style and no substance. The story just
died, never to be resolved.

What is painfully apparent is that each of these scandals is
part of a wider mosaic that, when all the tiles are placed together, show an
administration that is pathological in its dishonesty. Give credit where
credit is due: to Newsweek's Michael Isikoff for exposing this depraved
President, and to ABC's Sam Donaldson, who refuses to be fooled by White House
doubletalk.

Then again, we should also focus on those unfortunate family
members who've been embarrassed along with the President by these sordid
stories. I refer not to Hillary and Chelsea, but to their surrogate family
members in the media, like poor Eleanor Clift and Bryant Gumbel. Whatever
shred of credibility they hoped to retain throughout the Chutzpah President's
remaining days is gone, but it seems no one's told them. The day the story
broke, Clift defended Clinton on MSNBC: "Well, he's been elected twice
with people knowing that he has had affairs. Now is the fact that this woman
is 21, I mean she's still of age I suppose." Besides, Clift argued,
"libido and leadership is often linked." You could almost hear the
laughter.

On his Nielsen-challenged CBS show "Public Eye,"
Gumbel was even more partisan, and pathetically so: "These allegations
have been spawned by a series of secretly recorded audio tapes, behind the
tapes and the charges: Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, the same Republican
partisan who has unsuccessfully dogged Mr. Clinton for three and one-half
years." Gumbel asked reporter Scott Pelley: "Scott, as you and I
both know, a popular move these days is to make a titillating charge and then
have the media create the frenzy. Given Kenneth Starr's track record, should
we suspect that he's trying to do with innuendo that which he has been unable
to do with evidence?" No, but we should suspect that Gumbel is trying to
do with innuendo what he could never do with objective truth.

Clinton may still be in denial about his behavior, but the
media are just coming out of their denial. It's as if they've all suddenly
found a code word for his modus operandi: "Slick Willie." Welcome to
the club, folks. And maybe after you finish the Lewinsky story, you might try
to tie up all the other loose ends you've left untied.

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